Kamis, 18 Januari 2018

Amazon's top 20 HQ2 city picks are in. It's The Daily Crunch.

THE DAILY CRUNCH

THURSDAY, JANUARY 18 2018By Darrell Etherington

Amazon's final city HQ list highlights its 20 favorites, Tim Cook does an Americentric dog-and-pony show, and Google broadens access to machine learning tools. All that and more in The Daily Crunch for January 18, 2018.

Cities all but begged Amazon for its attention when the company announced it was looking for a second locale for a new North American HQ. Now, the early results are in, and 20 of those cities have been selected by Amazon for further consideration.

It's now going to come down to a process of digging deeper on this with the remaining finalists to figure out who wins, and it says it'll make a decision by the end of 2018.

There was even a photo-op where Tim Cook and Angela Ahrendts were digging holes in U.S. soil to signal their commitment. Some are claiming this is at least in part a response to Trump's protectionist policy setting, but it's still likely to earn Apple some PR points.

Google released a new tool called AutoML Vision which helps developers without machine learning programming expertise build image recognition models. That's cool, and it's likely to pave the way for the same kind of tools arising across various types of ML frameworks.

Facebook is going to look more closely at what influence Russia may have had on swaying the UK's Brexit vote, after initially being a bit dismissive in an earlier report. It might not reveal anything more significant, but then again, it could.

Huffington Post built its rep on contributions from unpaid writers, but now that's all coming to an end as it announced it's doing away with the program. What will social media, blockchain and security experts do now the they can't as easily pad their publication credits and bio?

YouTube doesn't want people posting videos of themselves eating, or pretending to eat Tide Pods. One day, I hope Tide Pod videos are all that remains of our human society, and aliens have to figure out what the hell we were up to just from that.